Missed a deadline? Poorly anticipated a workload increase? Forgot that your teams weren’t (yet) composed of tireless clones capable of delivering everything on time with a smile? Perfect. That’s exactly what we’re going to transform into a strategic advantage.
Planning errors are inevitable in agency life. But what distinguishes a high-performing organization from another is not the absence of errors. It’s its ability to draw lasting lessons from them, for the benefit of the team, profitability, and client satisfaction.
Here’s how.
Why Your Mistakes Are Worth Gold (If You Know How to Read Them)
According to PMI, poorly planned projects cost an average of 11.4% extra budget. And yet, few agencies truly capitalize on their mistakes.
Why? Because we often prefer to “move on” rather than look in the rearview mirror. Bad move. An unanalyzed error is an error we’ll pay for… twice.
Here are 3 pieces of good news:
- An error is rarely the fault of an isolated individual (phew!).
- A repeated error signals a systemic weakness (and therefore repairable).
- A well-exploited error creates a culture of continuous improvement (and strengthens team cohesion).
Top 5 Planning Mistakes
1. Overestimating Your Teams' Capabilities
You may have thought (or said) it before: “They can handle it, it’s not that heavy.”
In reality? Chronic overload is one of the primary factors of burnout in agencies.
A resource is not 100% available. Mental load, changing priorities, unforeseen events… all of this eats into time.
To do: base your schedules on realistic capacity (70 to 80% max), especially for key profiles.
2. Underestimating Invisible Workloads
Meetings, reporting, internal validations, coordination…
These tasks are never in the retrospective planning, but they cost a lot in real time.
A study by McKinsey reveals that managers spend an average of 62% of their week in coordination rather than actual production.
To do: integrate indirect workloads into each schedule, as you would for any deliverable task.
3. Forgetting the Human Dimension
Your collaborators are neither interchangeable, nor infallible, nor available 365 days a year.
A vacation, an illness, a drop in performance? Nothing exceptional… unless everything relies on that person.
To do : plan with a human buffer. And think redundancy for critical skills.
4. Neglecting Client Validations
“We’re just waiting for a quick go-ahead from the client.” — You’ve heard that before.
Except that a “quick go-ahead” often turns into back-and-forth over 10 days, or more.
To do: explicitly integrate feedback and modification times into your schedules. And negotiate a maximum number of back-and-forths upfront.
We're starting to track the criticality of projects and to easily visualize overruns. This is invaluable for reacting quickly.
5. Reproducing the Same Patterns Without Questioning
The previous project ended in an overnight sprint? But we’re keeping the same schedule for the next one?
Nothing is more costly than repeating predictable mistakes.
To do : set up a systematic feedback loop at the end of each project. Even 30 minutes is enough to capitalize on the experience while it’s fresh.
Transform error into collective intelligence
Rather than punishing, showcase your mistakes. It’s a powerful lever to improve the skills of the entire team.
1. Organize “project reviews” after the fact
Take 45 minutes, some post-its, and put everything on the table: what worked, what didn’t, why. Let the teams speak, not the managers. Objective: clarity + kindness.
2. Create a shared lessons learned database
A Notion, a Drive, or an internal tool, it doesn’t matter. Each experience feedback is recorded as a sheet: “Error – Impact – Lesson – New Practice”.
Your library of blunders becomes a gold mine.
3. Evolve your processes, not just your schedules
If you’re consistently two days short for mockups, maybe it’s your estimation method that needs reviewing, not just “adding margin”.
Situation | Instinctive reaction | Learning reaction |
Campaign delivered late | We blame the team or the client | We review resource allocation and internal validation |
Sprint blown up by day 2 | “We’ll do better next time” | We analyze the gaps between forecast and actual |
Task forgotten in the retroplanning | “No big deal, we did it in a rush” | We update the planning templates |
Unexpected client feedback | “It wasn’t planned” | We review the validation process and margins |
Overload of a key profile | We move a task “in a rush” | We rethink the distribution and workload alerts |
Benefits of a learning culture around mistakes
- Less mental load for your project managers
- More realistic schedules = better served clients
- A cross-functional skill improvement of teams
- A healthier atmosphere: people dare to say when things get stuck
- Better profitability through continuous optimization
And the icing on the cake: your teams no longer flee project reviews like the plague. They look forward to them as useful exchange moments. Crazy, right?
The Furious method
Want to go further? With Furious, each project becomes a source of truth. The tool allows you to:
- Analyze the gaps between planned and actual, project by project
- Identify recurring bottlenecks
- Streamline your post-project feedback with reliable data
- Improve your future estimates thanks to historical data
In short, no more blind management. You transform each past failure into a future competitive advantage.
Want to see how this translates in your context? Request your personalized demo:
You may be asking yourself these questions?
01 how to Prevent Mistakes from Being Experienced as Failures?
By integrating them into a continuous improvement logic. We analyze, we understand, we adjust. No blame, only learning.
02 should We Organize a Review for all Projects?
Not necessarily. Focus on significant projects or those that have experienced major deviations. The goal is impact, not bureaucracy.
03 how to Involve Teams in this Approach?
By putting them at the center of the process. The error doesn’t come “from the top” nor “from the ground”: it’s collective. Your teams often have the best ideas to correct it.
04 What to Do if the Same Mistakes Keep Recurring?
It’s a strong signal. Either the problem is poorly identified, or the proposed solutions are not being applied. In both cases, a broader reassessment is needed.
05 are there Tools to Better Track Planning Errors?
Yes, particularly Furious, which allows you to track discrepancies, time spent, actual workloads, and adjust your methods with concrete indicators.
